The Great Cat Massacre by Robert Darnton

The full title of this book, I should note quickly, is The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. It's by the historian Robert Darnton, originally published in 1984, and I am surprised to find that Darnton is both an even bigger deal than I expected (Philips, Harvard, Oxford, Princeton, National Book Critics Circle Award, Harvard Librarian) and is still alive.

And here I will point out that no one who reads this blog will care what I say about this book, and few (any?) even care about its subject. But this blog is a weird, capricious thing - basically a reading notebook I keep in public for odd, contingent, it-just-happened-that-way reasons - so I read whatever I want to read anyway, and then try to write something about it. I do appreciate you, dear readers - both of you - but I don't essentially care that you're out there.

The Great Cat Massacre is an early work in cultural history, which at the time was a somewhat established stream in French historical thought, but was less well-known in the English-speaking world. Darnton's specialty was then, and has been throughout his career, 18th century France. He's also done a lot of work on the history of the book, and seems to be a deeply textual historian - some are more data-focused, some have other interests, but Darnton's core analytical process stems from close reading of particular texts, which I appreciate.

This book presents six loosely related essays, or chapters. Each one looks at a specific text, and digs into the question of what that text tells us about the world it came from - how is that world different from our own, what is strange or surprising, what is distinctive and particular in that text and how that compares to other things we know or read. A long time ago, my own college thesis was vaguely in the same tradition - titled "Infratextual Structures in Poe, Bierce, and Lovecraft" when published in Lovecraft Studies #21; I think my original title didn't have the author names - so this is something I am inclined to be interested in (and, likely, boring about).

So Darnton first looks at fairy tales - in a very structured, research-driven way, comparing versions collected from the oral tradition with the more literary versions from particularly Perrault (since Darnton's focus is on France) but also the Grimms and other retellers across Europe - to, at first, debunk some very Freudian fairy-tale interpretations that were popular in the 1970s. The fairy-tale essay is the longest, and extends much farther than that initial focus; its goal, which Darnton admits is ambitious and declares can never be entirely complete, is to understand the cultural context of these stories. Who told them, to whom, and how were they understood at the time? If they are cautionary tales, what were they cautioning 18th century children against?

Darnton moves on from there to a printers-apprentice's account of that titular cat massacre, which, in his compelling telling, was mostly a sideways attack on the power and prestige of his master and especially his master's wife. Let me quote from his conclusion (on p.262) a passage that helps explain the mindset and point of the entire exercise of these essays:

As I tried to illustrate in explicating the cat massacre of the rue Saint-Séverin, the most promising moment in research can be the most puzzling. When we run into something that seems unthinkable to us, we may have hit upon a valid point of entry to an alien mentality, And once we have puzzled through to the native's point of view, we should be able to roam about in his symbolic world. To get the joke in the case of something as unfunny as a ritual slaughter of cats is a first step towards "getting" the culture.

Darnton is an academic, but writes in a reasonably clear style within that form. He does hedge his points, always being clear what he's willing to claim and what is speculation, and has a massive number of endnotes giving further reading, which I mostly skimmed.

The later chapters include one about the Encyclopedia, one on Rousseau, one on the reading life of a somewhat typical small-city bourgeois, and one on what looks like a fascinating treasure-trove of dossiers and documents from a police inspector tasked around 1750 with keeping track of the literary world of France, mostly because many of them were considered subversive. Darnton's methods are serious and, again, inherently academic, but he does seem to be one of the first to think about doing such close reading and implication-hunting in documents like these for an English-language audience.

And, of course, Darnton's topics are mostly about the world of books and reading - who read what, what lessons they took from it, how writers were seen by the authorities, what folktales "meant" to the people who retold them, and similar things. So those of us inclined to geek out on bookish topics are more likely to enjoy a book of Darnton's than one by another historian who concentrates, for example, on the lives of flax-weavers.

(Note: I have no clear idea of what flax is, nor whether it is possible to weave it.)

This is a forty-plus-year-old book; I found a used copy randomly a decade ago, and it's probably only vaguely in print, if that. I have no illusions many other people will want this particular book. But I do hope the kind of people who would read this blog are interested in the intellectual history of reading, in the question of how people in different times understood the world, and how we can understand people who are very different from us. In all those areas, Darnton has much to say.